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4.03 AVERAGE
4.03 AVERAGE
challenging
informative
medium-paced
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reflective
slow-paced
informative
slow-paced
informative
slow-paced
The Invention of the Jewish People is an often fascinating, often frustrating, account of the history and historiography of the Jewish ethnicity, Zionism, and modern Israel. Sand follows Benedict Anderson in assessing nationality as a potent and also ontologically weak framing. Nationhood is one of the things people are most willing to kill and die for, but trying to define a nation, as opposed to the political limits of a given state, or the cultural practices of an ethnicity, is an exercise in contradictions. But it is a necessary exercise, if you want to understand your own present.
The first fascinating bit was that Sand notes that every Israeli university has two history departments: one of General History which is pretty similar to a European or American history department, and one of Jewish History which has a unique intellectual orientation as the keeper of the national political mythology, and has it closest intellectual links to American Evangelical Biblical archeology. The political mythology is fairly simple. While the Torah doesn't have to be read literally as book of divine commandments, it can be read literally as history. The land between the Jordan river and the sea was home to Abraham, was conquered by exiles returning from Egypt, was ruled by the powerful kingdoms of David, Solomon, and the Hasmoneans, was taken from the Jews by the Romans, and was restored to the Jews in 1948.
Where this gets frustrating is a long historiographic dive into 19th century historians writing the history of the Jews against other Eastern European nation movements. I have no doubt that the basic question of whether a Jew could be German was of great import to these people, but I also think the matter was effectively settled by other political developments in the 1940s.
Sand then loops back to the ancient world to argue rather convincingly that Judaism expanded across the Mediterranean by conversion between the 2nd century BCE and the 4th century, making substantial progress against pagan beliefs before being forced into a subsidiary role against Constantine's state Christianity. The last great conversion was the Caucasian (in the exact sense of the mountains rather than the imprecise racial sense) kingdom of the Khazars. In Sand's history, modern Ashkenazi Jews are descended from the Khazars, and the people living in Palestine in the 19th and 20th century were the descendants of the common people of the Jewish kingdoms who were not removed by the Romans, as no evidence of this explusion exists, who converted to Islam for tax reasons under the Caliphate.
Those closing chapter loops around to the modern contradictions between Israel, a political and cultural entity, and the Jewish Nation, which exists everywhere there are Jews but is specifically instantiated in the borders of Israel and the occupied territories. Sand has something to say about Israeli politics around the time he was writing this book, and the politics have only gotten worse since, but I'm not entirely sure I follow. Most national mythologies are ultimately incoherent and built on racist nonsense; Israel has unfortunately chosen to double down on the worst aspects of its own mythology, since it must justify not only its recent historical existence, but the ongoing policies of the occupation.
The first fascinating bit was that Sand notes that every Israeli university has two history departments: one of General History which is pretty similar to a European or American history department, and one of Jewish History which has a unique intellectual orientation as the keeper of the national political mythology, and has it closest intellectual links to American Evangelical Biblical archeology. The political mythology is fairly simple. While the Torah doesn't have to be read literally as book of divine commandments, it can be read literally as history. The land between the Jordan river and the sea was home to Abraham, was conquered by exiles returning from Egypt, was ruled by the powerful kingdoms of David, Solomon, and the Hasmoneans, was taken from the Jews by the Romans, and was restored to the Jews in 1948.
Where this gets frustrating is a long historiographic dive into 19th century historians writing the history of the Jews against other Eastern European nation movements. I have no doubt that the basic question of whether a Jew could be German was of great import to these people, but I also think the matter was effectively settled by other political developments in the 1940s.
Sand then loops back to the ancient world to argue rather convincingly that Judaism expanded across the Mediterranean by conversion between the 2nd century BCE and the 4th century, making substantial progress against pagan beliefs before being forced into a subsidiary role against Constantine's state Christianity. The last great conversion was the Caucasian (in the exact sense of the mountains rather than the imprecise racial sense) kingdom of the Khazars. In Sand's history, modern Ashkenazi Jews are descended from the Khazars, and the people living in Palestine in the 19th and 20th century were the descendants of the common people of the Jewish kingdoms who were not removed by the Romans, as no evidence of this explusion exists, who converted to Islam for tax reasons under the Caliphate.
Those closing chapter loops around to the modern contradictions between Israel, a political and cultural entity, and the Jewish Nation, which exists everywhere there are Jews but is specifically instantiated in the borders of Israel and the occupied territories. Sand has something to say about Israeli politics around the time he was writing this book, and the politics have only gotten worse since, but I'm not entirely sure I follow. Most national mythologies are ultimately incoherent and built on racist nonsense; Israel has unfortunately chosen to double down on the worst aspects of its own mythology, since it must justify not only its recent historical existence, but the ongoing policies of the occupation.
Theough researching reviews, I discovered that a few of this author's theories have been debunked, so I thought it best to investigate this topic though more current lenses.
informative
slow-paced
informative
reflective
slow-paced
challenging
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Wasn't feeling it. Might try again some other time